NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra with GDDR3 RAM

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra with GDDR3 RAM - Page 1

Monday, March 22, 2004:
Good afternoon folks! An interesting
package just landed in the lab, that we thought you'd like to take a look at.
At first glance, the card below looks like an ordinary GeForce FX 5700 Ultra,
but upon closer inspection one major difference is revealed...

NVIDIA GEFORCE FX 5700 ULTRA WITH GDD3 MEMORY

Unlike the GeForce FX 5700 Ultras
available at retail, this particular card is equipped with Samsung GDDR3 memory.
Most of you have probably heard that next generation parts from NVIDIA will use
GDDR3 memory, and while we can't say anything for certain at the moment, this
little number sure does lend some credence to that information. The actual
part number on the memory chips is Samsung K4J55323QF-GC20 (more
information available here). We'll be installing this card into our
test-bed shortly and will let you know what we find. We're told this
particular card will perform just like any other 5700 Ultra, but we're more
interested in the memory's overclocking potential than anything else. Take
a look at the PDF linked above, and you'll see why - Samsung is rating some of
these parts for 800MHz (1600MHz DDR) operation.

Overclocking: NVIDIA's GeForce FX 5700 Ultra
with GDDR3 RAM

Unreal Tournament 2003 & Comanche 4 - Before and After

Update - Wednesday, March 24, 2004:We installed the
GeForce FX 5700 Ultra with GDDR3 memory into our Athlon 64
FX-53 test system to take a few reference scores and to
see how well the card, or more importantly its memory, would
overclock. In four previous reviews of retail-ready
GeForce FX 5700 Ultras, the memory on the cards overclocked
to the 1.03GHz - 1.06GHz range. The GDDR3 memory,
however, overclocked a bit higher. We were able to
take the GDDR3 memory on our reference 5700 Ultra all the
way up to a maximum of 1.11GHz. Using the Auto-Detect
feature built into NVIDIA's v56.56 Forceware drivers, the
card overclocked to 543MHz core / 1.09GHz memory. When
we did the tweaking manually, however, the card peaked at 549MHz /
1.11GHz.

We benchmarked
the card using Comanche 4 and Unreal Tournament 2003 at a
resolution of 1600x1200, with 4X anti-aliasing and 8X
anisotropic filtering enabled, to demonstrate the benefits of
overclocking. As you can see, overclocking the card
had a significant impact on its performance. In
Comanche 4, scores increased a total 18.7% with the card
overclocked, jumping from 25.32 frames per second to a
little over 30 FPS. We saw a similar increase in
performance with in Unreal Tournament 2003, where frame
rates
jumped from 42.24 FPS to 49.12 FPS - an increase of 16.3%.

The Samsung
GDDR3 memory's overclocking potential wasn't the only data
point we were interested in (and judging by your feedback
over the last two days, neither were you!). We
also set out to check the memory's temperature during normal
use and while overclocked. Unfortunately, because we
lack the necessary equipment to get a truly accurate
temperature reading from the surface of the memory chips
themselves, we had to settle for mounting a thermal probe to
the back of the PCB, directly behind the RAM.

Ambient

Memory

Stock

23.4°C

27.9°C

Overclocked

22.8°C

34.4°C

At stock clock
speeds, the thermal probe read a temperature that was only 4.5°C
above ambient. At this temperature the rear of the PCB directly behind the
RAM was just barely warm to the touch. As expected, when we
overclocked the card, the temperature readings went way up.
According to our decidedly unscientific setup, the
temperature peaked at 34.4°C,
which is a big jump considering we're measuring temperatures
on the underside of the PCB, the actual temperature of the
chips would be somewhat higher. However, at 34.4°C we
wouldn't say the GDDR3 memory was running terribly hot. The lower power requirements of
Samsung's GDDR3 memory definitely help keep temperatures in
check.

We've only been
experimenting with this card for a few days, and can't draw
too many conclusions because this is after all a reference
card that will not be sold at retail. We consider the
GeForce FX 5700 Ultra with GDR3 memory more of a "proof of
concept" than anything else. What we can say is that
Samsung's new GDDR3 memory is here, and it is already
capable of some impressive speeds. Samsung is claiming
yields of up to 800MHz (1.6GHz DDR) with this RAM, and rumor
has it some of these super-fast RAM chips will be making an
appearance on next-generation video cards. If this
turns out to be the case, we'll let you know as soon as
possible.